Citigroup Inc.’s top banker to governments is retiring, but has at least one more appointment to keep.
In September, Julie Monaco will travel to Europe for her bank’s Ukraine unit’s board meeting. It’s one sign of Ukraine’s importance to Citigroup, which is the only US bank still operating in the country and counts the government among its roughly 500 clients there. Now, it’s readying for the nation’s reconstruction once Russia’s war on Ukraine is ultimately over.
“There is business there that has continued to grow,” Monaco, Citigroup’s global head of public-sector banking, said in an interview. “There’s going to be a lot of opportunity and it will require a lot of capital.”
In her four-decade career, which started in trade finance, Monaco, 61, helped post-Soviet Russia connect to the Swift international payment system, helped build Citigroup’s close ties to New Zealand’s government and advised vaccine initiative Covax and its co-leader Gavi during the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s also worked on major debt deals, including helping Indonesia become the first country to issue bonds after the pandemic started.
Monaco is leaving Citigroup at a time when uncertainty about government policy making is at an all-time high and many of her clients are facing geopolitical instability and mounting debt levels.
Those will be top challenges for her successor, Stephanie von Friedeburg, a managing director who previously served as chief operating officer of International Finance Corp.
Citigroup, which converted a Kyiv bank vault into a bomb shelter for its staff, is already playing a significant role ushering capital into Ukraine, through funding by multilateral development banks, blended finance and private investors betting on the upside of reconstruction after years of war. The bank is working with development-finance institutions in the US and UK to ensure funding for Ukraine’s reconstruction before the war ends.
The total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine is estimated at $524 billion over the next decade — about 2.8 times the country’s nominal gross domestic product for 2024, the World Bank said in February.
Ukraine’s energy, real estate and transportation sectors are top candidates to court interest from foreign investors. Its emerging military-technology sector, which now counts more than 200 drone firms, may also be an investment attraction, she said. More investor interest will be on show in July at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome.
Monaco warned that a lot of investors’ interest still hinges on the signing of a peace deal.
“We still have a war to get through,” she said. “It’s difficult to start major investment projects when things are still being destroyed.”
Aside from Russia’s war on Ukraine, governments around the world are burdened by rising levels of sovereign debt, which has grown even amid persistently high borrowing costs. That’s set to trigger more countries looking to sell assets to meet repayment obligations, Monaco added.
“We are coming to a point where we will see real actions from governments to deal with excessive debt levels,” Monaco said. “We will start seeing more asset monetization.”
That may also materialize with debt swaps, in which nations, with the help of development agencies and multilateral lenders, buy back some debt at a discount and designate the savings for projects such as energy and food security, she said.
After decades of heavy travel — including many trips to Davos — Monaco, who enjoys scuba diving and skiing, is looking forward to doing it on her own terms.
“The inside of conference rooms and Starbucks look the same,” she said, “whether you’re in Beijing or New York.”
With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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